Collection Connections: The "You" You Think You Are: "Twelfth Knight," RPGs, and Identity

I open with a confession, though people may already know this if they’ve read my blog or encountered me on social media. I am a capital-F Fan of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, otherwise known as the book series that inspired HBO’s Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. Inspired by these books, I’ve given conference papers and lectures, run convention sessions (including at the infamous 2014 DashCon, but that’s a separate story), written academic articles¹ and blog posts, edited essay collections, appeared on podcasts and YouTube channels to talk about minutiae,² and I’ve written over 300,000 words of fanfiction. So, I identified with Viola Reyes, one of the two protagonists in Alexene Farrol Follmuth’s YA novel, Twelfth Knight.

Follmuth transposes the play’s main plotline to a high school in California. Jack “Duke” Orsino is the latest in a football dynasty whose future plans are upset when he injures his knee. This is the inciting incident for his journey of self-discovery, alongside that of Viola, his prickly classmate who makes no secret of her disdain for him and all other jocks. Outside of school, Viola is a fan of the TV series War of Thorns, clearly meant to evoke Game of Thrones. Rather than a book series, War of Thorns is based on a tabletop RPG campaign, one that Viola unsuccessfully tries to get her D&D—I mean ConQuest—group to run early in the book. She channels her rage into a video game, specifically an MMORPG³ called Twelfth Knight, vaguely inspired by the Arthurian legend (dirtbag medievalism strikes again!). Her male avatar, Cesario, is based on her favorite character from War of Thorns, and has allowed her to largely avoid the stream of toxic misogyny and sexual harassment that often plagues gamers who aren’t cis white men. While Viola clearly resents the necessity of hiding her gender, she also revels in the freedom it gives her to be her real curmudgeonly self.

It is through this video game that the relationship between Vi and Jack develops. Jack starts playing Twelfth Knight during his convalescence, and encounters Cesario, who reluctantly agrees to help him learn how to play. For obvious reasons, we don’t get into the weeds of gameplay, but Follmuth does a great job balancing the universe of the game with the interactions between Vi and Jack. It also gives the book one of its big thematic underpinnings, which is the question of identity. How many identities do each of us carry within us, and how do we reconcile them? How honest can and should we be with others about those identities when exposing them leaves us vulnerable? And in a society that places so much value on individual accomplishment, how do teenagers grapple with the incredibly difficult task of figuring out who they are?

Twelfth Night is a fantastic play to use as a starting point for this kind of story. It’s already got multiple plotlines that (largely) don’t impact one another, a ridiculous love quadrangle, and a healthy heaping of gender trouble. But at its core, it is a story of characters figuring out who they are and what they truly want from life. Viola, Orsino, and Olivia all begin the play knowing, or so they believe, exactly what will make them happy. Orsino wants Olivia, Olivia wants Cesario, and Viola just wants to get through the day at her new job without letting on that she has the hots for her boss.

We have a rough idea of when Twelfth Night was written, based on a description in the diary of John Manningham of a production at Middle Temple on 2 February 1602. We also know it was performed at the court of King James I in 1618 and 1623, but the earliest surviving text we have for it is in the First Folio.

Shakespeare was likely inspired by several Italian novelle, many of which feature shenanigans involving one or several sets of twins (see also: The Comedy of Errors). There was an Italian play galled Gl’Ingannati [The Deceived] written early in the sixteenth century and a regular fixture amongst travelling companies, about a young woman who disguises herself as a man and courts another woman on behalf of her lord, only to find herself the object of pursuit. There’s even a twin brother who turns up at the end to solve everyone’s problems.

One of the biggest changes Follmuth makes—and one I’d argue is necessary to any modern reimagining of Twelfth Night—is to preserve the relationship between Viola and her twin brother Sebastian. While Viola might claim they have little in common, her taking on multiple identities over the course of the book is not too far from Sebastian’s drama kid lifestyle. And it is Sebastian who pushes Viola into being honest with Jack, and with herself, about the person she wants to be.

RECOMMENDATIONS

• If you enjoyed the nerdiness and humor of this book but wish it had more romance, try Olivia Dade’s Spoiler Alert and its sequels.
• If you liked the Arthurian elements in Twelfth Knight and how they operated within a modern setting, try Legendborn by Tracy Deonn.